Arabic Virtual Academy

Obedience to the rulers (part 1)

We find that people are running around the Muslim countries spreading all kinds of problems in terms of how the masses of the people should react to those things that they are not pleased with. This is especially true when it comes to things that we see from the Muslim Rulers. They are telling the people that they should not be patient with what they think that they see. They tell them that they should not listen to what is being said and should be speaking out against what we consider to be incorrect. We want to show you in this article that this is not the situation that Allah commands us with, nor that which the Prophet (may Allah’s peace and blessings be upon him) ordered us to follow.

First and foremost we need to understand that Allah has commanded us in His book to be obedient to the leaders. This is what we as Muslims should be trying to adhere to, over that which some people may be trying to convince us is what we need to be doing. Allah says {O you who believe, obey Allah and obey the Messenger and those in authority among you.} [4:59]. So we see here that the command from Allah is clear in terms of where our obedience should be when it comes to those in authority over us. We do not move from this fundamental principle until something clear comes from Allah which changes this, regardless of the speech of some of the people. As we know, especially in these days and times, many people are prone to speaking and not being upon clarity themselves. They, without really taking the time to study something, run around making assumptions as to what is meant by different verses and narrations and preach this to the masses of people, causing many to be confused and knowing what is correct in the situation. We must beware of listening to these people.

We also see that Prophet (may Allah’s peace and blessings be upon him) has commanded us to be obedient to the rulers on many different occasions. For instance there is a hadeeth on the authority of ِAbu Hurairah (may Allah be pleased with him) said that the Prophet (may Allah’s peace and blessings be upon him) said, “Whoever obeys me has obeyed Allah. And whoever disobeys me has disobeyed Allah. And whoever has obeyed the Ameer (leader) has obeyed me. And whoever has disobeyed the Ameer (leader) has disobeyed me” [reported by al Bukhari and Muslim].So we see here that in the end of this hadeeth he tied the issue of obeying the Ameer (leader) to his own obedience. Just as he told us that disobeying the Ameer is in turn disobeying him. This is a big situation especially because of what we learned in the beginning of this hadeeth. That in our obedience to the Messenger (may Allah’s peace and blessings be upon him) we are being obedient to Allah. The same holds true to the disobedience of the Prophet, as it is in itself the disobedience of Allah. May Allah forgive us all for our shortcomings. Allahuma ameen.

Thus far, we see that the underlying principle is that we are commanded to be obedient to our leaders. This command did not come from just anyone or anything. Rather it came from the Lord of the worlds’. This is a command that we should be trying hard to maintain and uphold regardless of what rhetoric that we may come across or that may be poured into our ears. We need to understand that we do not leave off the command of Allah for anything other than the command of Allah, whether it be in His book or on the tongue of His Messenger (may Allah’s peace and blessings be upon him). All of the beautiful speech and seeming intellectual deductions that people are running around spreading among the masses are just causing confusion. Even if we hear it, which we should try to turn away from whenever possible, we should never repeat it and make others doubt that which we have been commanded with from the Lord of the worlds.

You may be asking yourself why we call it rhetoric. The answer to that question is simple. Most times we will find that our leaders are trained to deal with certain situations that we have no training to deal with. They know things that may be happening that we are not aware of that may be going on around us. They are charged with protecting the people under them from things which we do not see and harms that we did not even know exist. This causes them to do things that may seem strange to us, but most times they are only strange because we do not understand the whole picture.

Just as many times as children, we found our parents decisions to be strange, strict or unfair, but as we became older we find that they were for our betterment and protection. Many times we find that we saw their statements and actions as oppressive only because of our own ignorance or the reality of what was happening around us. This is the situation that most of us are in, and we need to recognize this. We need not to fall into listening to people spewing seemingly beautiful and intellectual speech which is based off of nothing but ignorance and misinformation. Especially when we are talking about allowing them to influence us to disobey Allah and His Messenger in their command to be obedient to the leaders.